Magic... one of the staples of the fantasy genre. Everyone knows that casting magic in fantasy games is usually unnecessarily hard, and usually involves hotkeys. Well, Magicka is here to change that. Unfortunately, it still involves hotkeys. Magicka has a simple idea driving it: dynamic spell casting. This is just what it sounds like: you press a key to cast a spell. However, it gets a little more complex than that. The QWERASDF keys are each mapped to a different element (water, life, shield, frost, lightning, arcane, earth, and fire, in the order the keys are listed). Single-element, single-press spells are easy to cast, and can be effective, but they tend to be no fun, or at least not as fun as they could be. And the spell system definitely was designed with them in mind. See, you can use up to 5 different elements in a single spell, which is where the game starts to get interesting. Different combinations of elements allow you to cast different spells, and the elements react in some fun ways. This is where the game's true appeal comes from: casting and successfully using spells in unconventional ways. For example, combining shield and arcane makes a barrier of land mines. Add in the fact that there are four different ways to cast spells: regular, self, area, and weapon. Regular spells react the fact that you think they would: cast frost and a spray of snow shoots out of your staff that ices over enemies and turns the ground below the area of effect into permafrost, and will turn water into ice to walk across it. Self spells cast the chosen spell on yourself: self-cast fire and you will set yourself on fire, significantly shortening your expected lifespan. Area casting changes the spell's area of effect to a circle around your character. Area-cast earth to make an earthquake around your character, for example. Melee casting works a little differently: your sword is imbued with the element. If you melee cast lightning, your next sword swing will shock your enemy, and all of the enemies around the unlucky fellow. There are also magicks you can discover: magicks are spells that you can cast by conjuring the needed elements and pressing the spacebar. All of this raises a serious question, though: can't you just go into combat with a huge spell prepared and completely own everything in your path? Actually, you can't: every element in your currently conjured (that you haven't cast yet), your movement is reduced by 20%. So, if you have a big spell prepared going in to combat, you are practically a sitting duck for your enemies. The game's setting, unfortunately, is a lot less intuitive than the spellcasting: it's a typical cut-and-paste fantasy setting, and the plot is as well. What saves this game from being a complete cliche in this subject is the sense of humor. The game has homages in it of everything from Indiana Jones (a goblin shaman yelling KAH-LI-MAAA!) to Games Workshop (a blacksmith named Gram who as a Gram's Workshop sign, written in the Games Workshop logo style, outside of his house) to Terry Pratchett (occasionally, you find walking treasure chests made of sapient pearwood). In addition to throwing in nerd/pop culture references from all over the place, the game just has a goofy sense of humor (my personal favorite is the boss fight at the end of the tutorial: you fight a Beholder, and come up out of the dungeon, and the first thing anybody says to you is "we sent our pet beholder down there to look around for you.") So, the humor definitely saves the game in this department. One thing I really don't want to mention is the bugs: the game does have some of these. Occasionally it won't load the title screen properly, the game crashes just barely enough to be irritating, and sometimes text boxes won't load during conversation (which is a pain in the ass, since all of the characters speak in a cross between Nordic and Gibberish.) But, despite these bugs, Magicka is definitely worth checking out, or, at the very least, downloading the demo.
PLOT: 3/5. There really isn't much here, but it's fine if you like a chuckle or two.
GAMEPLAY: 5/5. Magicka nails this. There really won't be a good way to go back to traditional spellcasting once you get the hang of this.
GRAPHICS: 4/5. The graphics aren't anything special, but the effects (ice, fire, etc.) look great in the way they interact with the environment.
GRAPHICS: 4/5. The graphics aren't anything special, but the effects (ice, fire, etc.) look great in the way they interact with the environment.
Total score: 12/15
No comments:
Post a Comment